Temptation in the Desert

Just for a moment, try to imagine what the beginning of Jesus’s earthly ministry would be like without the devil.  Yes, I know, this is kind of an odd exercise.  And no, I’m not trying to give the devil credit for anything.  But think about it.  What would we hear about Jesus’s forty days in the desert if we heard nothing about the devil?  It would be a short, serene story: Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, went out into the desert and ate nothing for forty days.  When it was over he was hungry.  I’m sorry, our translation says “famished.”  That’s a little more interesting than “hungry,” but not much. 

We could of course say some things about a story like that.  We would note Jesus’s purity and self-control.  We would assume that Jesus prayed during that time, though in fact there isn’t anything specific said about that in Luke’s Gospel.  We would of course reflect on the fact that Jesus spent forty days in the desert just as the Israelites wandered for forty years.  We would reflect on the fact that after his baptism Jesus is filled with the Holy Spirit.  But those forty Spirit-filled days pass silently in this story.  I guess they were beyond our comprehension. 

Which is to say that if it weren’t for the devil and his offers of food and power and false security, this story would tell us very little about who Jesus is and who we are. 

It’s an old problem in storytelling, isn’t it?  You can’t tell a great story about serene perfection.  The old legends about the saints who fled to their monasteries—many of them in the desert—they would never have been told if there hadn’t been demons to visit and tempt.  You can’t tell stories about monks who live happily ever after in reverent silence, because nothing happens to them.  The devil needs to pay a call!  Things have to get juicy!

In the great spiritual classic the Life of Saint Antony by Athenasius, the holy monk Antony spends long periods of time alone in his cell in the desert.  At times he is visited by evil spirits that know how to change their shapes, and they seem to break through the walls of his cell and take the form of “lions, bears, leopards, bulls, serpents, asps, scorpions, and wolves.”  It’s vivid.  At another time visitors who are standing outside his cell—he won’t let them in—testify that they hear the sounds of great crowds of people within: “clamoring, dinning, sending forth piteous voices and crying ‘[…T]hou canst not abide our attack!’” 

Now that’s a story.  That tells us something about the holy Antony, just as our Gospel this morning tells us something about Jesus.  When the devil comes around, holy stories get interesting in a hurry.  When there is real temptation, real testing, holy men and holy women start to put some flesh on their holiness.  They start to reveal something about who God is.  I don’t say this because I want the devil to have credit for making us interesting.  On the contrary, I say this because God is so good.  God is so good to us and we don’t even know it.  God is so good to us and we won’t say a word about it because we are afraid to tell the whole story.  We are afraid even to tell the story to ourselves.

Most of us, if asked to talk about who we are and where we’ve been and what God has done in our lives will stammer and give the blandest, most formulaic response.  “I’m a cradle Episcopalian and I like your music,” we will say, or “I’ve been looking for a church and I thought I’d try this one.”  Or “I’ve been a member of this parish for years.” And though it’s sad enough that we can’t tell each other the whole rich story of how God redeemed us, most of us will do our best to forget the story ourselves.  We will forget on a daily basis that we’ve struggled just to make it into adulthood.  We’ll forget that moment of decision that could have ruined our lives, but didn’t.  We’ll forget a million ways that we’ve been saved and protected and set free because we don’t want to remember that we were ever that low.  We want to tell a story of serene perfection because we are afraid that the real dust on our feet from that long desert journey will be too shameful to expose.

And the beautiful actions of God who made us from dust and filled us with the Spirit will be forever buried along with our fear and our shame and our powerlessness.  But this is a season of remembering dust, isn’t it?  We were just here Wednesday, just getting marked with the sign of the cross in ash.  “Remember that you are dust,” we were told, “and to dust you shall return.”

So, in this season of remembering and confessing, let me ask: who are you?  What whispered in your ear on the way to church this morning?  Did you wake up and get yourself here despite the fact that your heart was filled with anxiety and crippling self-doubt?  Are you here hoping that the feelings of loss will subside, that the bad relationship will not define you?  Is today just one day, is this hour just one hour, in a lifelong struggle with addiction?  Have you fought an epic daily battle with racism in order to be here today with your self-respect and generosity intact?  Would anyone understand what your wandering in the desert has been like? How long have you been hungry?  What are you hungry for?  Are you famished?

And what devilish fantasies about being full and safe and powerful have you had to put aside?  Because those fantasies are everywhere in our world, and we need to talk about them.  How did the Spirit guide you to give up the relentless pursuit of wealth or perfection?  How did the Spirit fortify you when you were tempted to make food or fitness into a god?  When you were tempted to dwell on your resentments?  When you were tempted to judge another person with withering scorn?  How did God turn you around when your heart closed up and your feelings went cold?  How did you turn aside from contempt when it rose up in you?  How did you find the grace to admit your mistakes and your laziness and your lack of focus and your habitual boredom?  How did God find you in that desert and fill you with enough love to bring you here to this improbable place?  How did God make you honest and willing and forgiving? 

I mean this in all orthodox piety and belief, I really do, so don’t mistake me when I say “Let the devil show up.”  Let the truth be told.  Name what troubles you.  Out in his desert cell, Saint Antony’s demons were shaped like “lions, bears, leopards, bulls, serpents, asps, scorpions, and wolves.”  Even Jesus, in his desert days, was faced with temptations to power and manipulation and soul-killing illusions of invulnerability.

And if you are willing to admit it, something is eating away at you too.  And in the particular shape of that temptation, there is a whole Gospel full of truth about God.  There is the particular shape of God’s saving grace in your life.  There is a story that no one else can tell.  There is a triumph—I don’t care how bad you feel, if you’re here today God has scored another victory—and we need to know what it is.  For ourselves, for each other, and for the world: name God’s victory.  Let the vivid truth of your salvation be known.

Name it in your heart.  Name it in conversation.  Name it at confession in the Lady Chapel on Saturday morning at 9:30, or by appointment.  Tell it all.  The works of God are infinite.  God’s mercy is abundant and ever-fresh.  And you are the teller of that tale in this world.  Speak the word.

Preached by Mtr. Nora Johnson

The First Sunday in Lent

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

Ashes and Tears

The great English writer George Orwell is known not only for his insightful and prescient fiction writing, but also for a short, posthumously-published autobiographical account, looking backward to his boarding school days, in which he gives a detailed description of the corporal punishment he received as a school-boy.  The headmaster of the school, Orwell tells us, employed a riding crop for the purpose at first, but eventually graduated to the use of “a thin rattan cane which hurt very much more.”  A boy might find himself on the receiving end of the cane for a number of reasons.  Orwell’s first offense – as a newly arrived and homesick eight-year-old – was wetting his bed, for which the crop was applied as an antidote.

By the time he was older, Orwell reports that the device was deployed as a study-aid, as well, if it struck the headmaster that a boy was not applying himself:

“…and then,” he writes, “it would be ‘All right, then, I know what you want. You've been asking for it the whole morning. Come along, you useless little slacker. Come into the study.’ And then whack, whack, whack, and back one would come, red-wealed and smarting… to settle down to work again.

“…. It is a mistake,”  he wrote, “to think such methods do not work. They work very well for their special purpose. …. The boys themselves believed in its efficacy. There was a boy named Beacham, with no brains to speak of, but evidently in acute need of a scholarship….  He went up for a scholarship [exam] at Uppingham, came back with a consciousness of having done badly, and a day or two later received a severe beating for idleness. ‘I wish I'd had that caning before I went up for the exam,’ he said sadly….”[i]

You useless little slackers.  Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

I suppose few of us these days have been subjected to corporal punishment, but a day like Ash Wednesday can easily evoke a memory of it, even if the memory isn’t ours, per se.  So many impressions made by the church gave credence to the idea that Lent is a time for corporal punishment of one kind or another: that even if self-flagellation isn’t your thing, self-denial, confession, and repentance amount to rattan canes of a different color, more or less, and that although they may hurt, that is part of what makes them good for you.    You’ve been asking for it all year, and now we begin with a smudge or two of ash, and then: whack, whack, whack! – flogging you toward some righteous goal.

On the other hand, of course, is the thought that anyone who actually shows up to church for this stuff, is suffering delusionally in the same way as that boy who wished he’d had the caning before he went to his exam, on the perverse theory that it would have helped him do better.  This, many suppose, is the logic of religious thought.  Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return: whack, whack, whack!  Does it hurt yet? We can keep doing this until it does, and then you will finally be ready to be better.

In this manner do we make the Way of Jesus to be a path of cruel judgment and crushing guilt, in which the best thing that can happen to you is that you get walloped hard enough that by dint of your smarting backside and your guilty conscience you will be led back onto the path of righteousness.  Welcome to Lent, everybody, and welcome to the Christian life!

But does this approach really do anybody any good, and did it ever?  Listen again to George Orwell:  “Till the age of about fourteen I believed in God, and believed that the accounts given of him were true. But I was well aware that I did not love him. On the contrary, I hated him, just as I hated Jesus….  The Prayer Book told you… to love God and fear him: but how could you love someone whom you feared?”

I wonder how many of us come to church on any given day aware that we do not really love God at all, and perhaps only inches away from the admission that, in fact, we hate God, and hate Jesus, too.  For how can we love someone whom we have been told to fear, just for starters?

If I dig a little in the Oxford English Dictionary – to around the third or fourth definition of “fear” – eventually I get to “a mingled feeling of dread and reverence towards God.”  I suppose this might be the ideal state of the worshiper on Ash Wednesday: to arrive here with a mingled feeling of dread and reverence towards God.  And I suppose that by many reckonings it is my job to confirm in you both the reverence and the dread, you useless little slackers.  But I strongly suspect that by adopting this attitude I will in no way assist you in learning to love God or his Son Jesus, and I may, instead, help you to learn to hate God; since, how can you love someone whom you fear?

Jesus himself was woefully inept, by all accounts, at instilling fear in those he encountered.  Quite to the contrary, he seemed to invite taunts and teasing regularly in his ministry, as in his Passion and Dying.  And yet I suspect there are as many people out there in the streets these days who hate God, who despise Jesus, as there are who either love him or fear him.  Too many rattan canes in too many novel shapes, colors, and sizes, I suspect.  Too much of the church accusing the would-be-faithful of being useless little slackers.  And what better day to hone our skills in that regard than Ash Wednesday?

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

But the ancient words of a prophet today suggest with great specificity that my role here is not to flog you toward some righteous goal with the aid of a riding crop or a rattan cane.  The prophet suggests, rather, that I should take my place somewhere between the vestibule (there) and the altar (there), and weep.  Should I weep for myself or for you?  Is it because of your waywardness, or my inadequacies as your priest?  The prophet doesn’t say, which seems to allow for either possibility, or both.  And through my tears, I should send this prayer to God: “Spare your people, O Lord; and do not make your heritage a mockery.  Spare your people.”

The instruments of Ash Wednesday are ashes and tears.  And the aim of Ash Wednesday, like the aim of all of Lent, like the aim of all God’s intent, is love, not fear, and not hate.

Spare your people, O Lord; and do not make your heritage a mockery.  Spare your people, for we are but dust, and to dust we shall return.

From where I stand, between the vestibule and the altar, I can’t for the life of me see what good a decent caning would do any of you, or my own self, for that matter.  Nor do I hear in God’s call to repentance the justification for telling you all (or even myself) what useless little slackers you are.

I can, however, see plenty of reasons to weep.  I can see, for instance, how often pulpits have been used more effectively to cause people to hate Jesus (in teaching people to fear him) than to love him.  And that makes me want to weep.

I can see how often the prayers of the needy, the frightened, the anxious, and the wronged seem to go unanswered, and how this causes so many to lose faith in God, and that makes me want to weep too.

I can see what a mess we people – Christians and otherwise – make of so much that God has given us, and that makes me want to weep too.

And I can see my own sad faults, and sometimes some of yours, too, and that makes me want to weep too.

And what do we deserve for our sins and offenses?  A good beating?

It would, of course, be much simpler if young Beacham (the English schoolboy with no brains to speak of, but in such need of a scholarship) had been correct.  Or if the headmaster of his school had been correct, and all we really needed was a good caning to beat the idleness out of us and flog us onward toward righteousness.  What a cheap thrill it would be for me to preach to you on Ash Wednesday under such circumstances!  But God has put no crop nor cane in my hands.  He has, rather, given me ashes and tears, along with the task of reminding you that if we begin and end as dust, then we have only this time in between the dust to make the most of it.

Hate God, or love God.  Call Jesus your enemy or your friend.  God remains a mystery to us, even in loving us, so that we easily draw the wrong conclusion, what with so much cause for tears and all.  But if God is not coming for you with a crop or a cane, but rather, with ashes and tears, would that change the way you see things?

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

We have only this time between the dust, to make the most of it.  So, leave the weeping to me and to the other priests, between the vestibule and the altar.  And remember that God loved the dust he made us from before he made us, because he made the dust too, and breathed life into it in order to get you and me out of the dust.

And do not doubt that God will hear the prayer, and will answer it, and all the more so as he sees us learning to love one another. 

Spare your people, O Lord, and do not make your heritage a mockery.  Spare your people, O Lord.

For we remember that we are dust, and to dust we shall return.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen

Ash Wednesday 2016

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia

[i] George Orwell, “Such, such were the joys,” October 1952, originally in Partisan Review

Dazzling Light

This winter, I’ve been taking a digital photography class at the Fleischer Art Memorial here in town. This past week, our instructor was talking to us about how difficult it is to shoot white. Don’t leave a lot of plain white in your shots, she said. First of all, while it might look great on the LCD screen on the back of your camera, when you go to make a print, all of that white will just look like the photo paper showing through. White doesn’t really work, she said, without a little bit of tone, a little shadow, and contrast. She then asked to see an example of a photo one of us had taken with lots and lots of white. And I had the perfect picture. My husband and I had recently been on vacation, and one of the shots I had taken was of a particularly bright scene of brilliant sunlight shining in a pale sky with just a little contrast down at ground level. Perfect! she said, it’s not a bad shot, but if you had just adjusted your exposure compensation (which I now know how to do, thank you very much), all of that washed-out color in the sky would appear richer, more peach – and, she said, you’d be able to more depth and contour in this snow down here.

Now this was a problem. Because the vacation my husband and I had taken was to San Diego. And the photo I had shown her was of Laguna Beach. Now maybe my teacher’s mistakenly seeing the white in my photo as snow banks instead of crashing waves means that I am some kind of prodigy of uniquely horrible nature photography, like the anti-Ansel Adams. If that’s true, thank God I’m taking her class. But I don’t think this is the case. I think my teacher’s mistake simply proved her point in a way even she couldn’t have imagined. With that much white, and that much sunlight, there was no way to see what I had been shooting. The stuff of my shot was fundamentally obscured, and we couldn’t see what was actually there in the photograph. We were left squinting, turning the monitor from side to side, trying to see what was behind all of that light. We were left dazzled and definitely confused.

Dazzling white. This is the phrase that’s used in every one of the synoptic Gospels to describe the moment of Jesus’ transfiguration. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell us that the clothes Jesus was wearing that day became dazzling white – so white, Mark says, that they were like no fuller could ever bleach them. In the Gospel we heard today, Luke chooses to leave out Mark’s little OxiClean commercial, but he still gives us this evocative phrase – dazzling white. And then Luke adds an important detail - that this bright, blinding light was a sign of Jesus’ glory – the glory perhaps of the Son of Man, who at the end of time will come down from heaven clothed in a white robe to judge the world. Or the glory of a human being who is also fully divine. Or perhaps this moment is foreshadowing – forelightening? – the glory of the day of resurrection.

Whatever the glory is that Luke is referring to – really any and all of these things – we do know for sure that this glory hurt to look at. The white of Jesus’ robes was brilliantly, blindingly, eye-squintingly bright. It was a color that made your eyes run, a color that made you snap your hand up and turn your face to the side. It was dazzling white – and not dazzling as a synonym for stunningly super-fabulous, but dazzling as a word that comes from the word “daze.” The sight of Jesus’ transfiguration was daze-inducing, and each of the Gospels wants to be sure that we know that.

But the disciples, God bless them, they just keep right on looking. They’re dazed and sleepy, to be sure, but the glare of the bright white is too powerful to be ignored. They look at the shining glory of Jesus and Moses and Elijah through the shield of their fingers, squinting and blinking, probably seeing a rainbow of neon every time they close their eyes. It’s no wonder poor Peter wants to build a booth – a booth, he thinks! – some shade, a tiny bit of shadow to save my wrecked retinas. But Jesus knows that this scene won’t work well in a booth. It just won’t be a good photo. There is no exposure compensation, no ISO setting, no F stop that will capture this scene without so many spectral highlights that you might think you’re looking at an Alpine ski resort instead of a Mediterranean mountaintop. This is not a scene that can be captured. But Peter doesn’t know that. He hardly knows what he’s saying – he’s a complete novice at seeing light like this, he’s just a student, and he has been completely dazzled.

But God knows. God knows what to say, and God knows what to do. God sends the disciples a shadow in the shape of a cloud from heaven, so that they can finally put down their hands and fully open their eyes. For God understands light; God made it, after all. And God knows that the best light is light alongside shadow, light that has tone and context, light that isn’t just white. God knows that an overcast sky is the best sky for camerawork – that images seen on a cloudy day show the substance of the object being shot, not just the light shining off of that object. And it’s the object, the person, that beloved Son and Chosen One, that God wants the disciples to see. So God sends a cloud to descend upon the bright mountaintop, and God speaks to them in the close hush of the misty fog, and the disciples listen, and the disciples see.

Whether we know it or not, we worship in a place where that same cloud descends all the time. The presence of Almighty God moves over this place all the time, is moving over it right now. God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, blows in within a cloud of holiness that at this low altitude reaches a particular condensation point right there, on that altar. And in the midst of this cloud, under that shadow of the Most High, we can look up, open our eyes, and see – bread held out for you to hold, wine shimmering in the soft light of the chalice, hands lifted in absolution or lowered onto bent heads in blessing. The cloud is all around us, casting its shadows in all the right places so that we can see our salvation and hear his name – this is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him.

But on this day when we remember the light of the transfiguration, on this last Sunday after the Epiphany when we gather together the light that led the wise men to the manger, the light that shone upon Christ in his baptism and gave Simeon and Anna eyes to see, we remember that there is more than just what we can see here under this cloud of God’s presence. There is more light here. Here is the brilliant glory that shines at the heart of God and is revealed in his only Son. Here is the light that breaks into this world and turns the shadow of death into morning. Here is the light poured out upon us through cracks opened up by our prayer, our longing, our need, even our sin. Here is more light, more glory, than our eyes can take in.

And we are promised that one day we will stand in the presence of God and see that light face to face. But for now, we, like the disciples, cannot bear that light. We still need this cloud of stillness to help us see holy things – bread and wine, ash and oil, altar and tabernacle. For now we may see dimly, but we can still see. And so we give thanks for the cloud that swirls all around us, for the texture and tone that it gives to our faith. We give thanks for the cloud that transforms us into pictures of love, mercy, truth, and justice. We give thanks for the cloud that allows us to be a witness, to be a disciple, to be here, to listen and to look at the Son. Alleluia.

Preached by Mother Erika Takacs

7 February - Last Epiphany

Saint Mark's Church, Philadelphia